The most over-rated movie ever made

Rating: Null/10 (19 May 2004)

There is too much good stuff in The Longest Day for it to be called totally worthless, but it's certainly less good than you'd think, given its credentials. The film was an incredibly epic production, probably right up there with Lawrence of Arabia for sheer number of extras, number of costumes, number of locations, etc. This may actually be the films problem: it's too big to hold together, and collapses under its own weight.
The film touted itself as having a cast of "48 international stars." I don't think its being timid to say that's too many. It obviously lets out much by way of character development, and even makes it hard to keep track of who's who. The audience is expected to keep track of dozens of subtitles telling characters' names and affiliations. This is mitigated somewhat by the star system, however that brings up another problem -- no single player is able to get enough screen time to really capture our attention. John Wayne swaggers forth for what looks like it could have been one of the best movies of his career, and then never really gets to do anything.
And really, the script is just plain bad. A lot of the dialogue sounds bizarrely amateurish, and more than a few situations are so badly conceived its more like a comedy than a "war epic." Big dramatic moments are written in that never come to anything, and supposedly big moments are shoehorned in when there's been nothing to remotely build up to them. Any kind of tension or coherent pacing are nowhere to be seen, and this is worsened by the fact that the film is criminally over-long. It could have ended over an hour before it does, and when it finally does end, it would be hard to imagine a more arbitrary moment for it.
One can probably tell a lot from the fact that the film had three directors, nearly a dozen screenwriters, and an army of consultants. With so many voices clamouring at once, its no surprise the film takes the vague, rambling shape it does, with no single, coherent voice shining through.
And the combat. Oh, the combat. Imagine if you will the fantasies of a six-year old with only the vaguest idea of what a war consists of. Now imagine that same six-year old given a Hollywood epic budget to put his fantasies on screen. That's what a lot of the film's fighting looks like. We're spoiled for realism in this age of Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, where We Were Soldiers is the worst it gets. The Longest Day is the product of another age, where it was thought necessary to romanticize war and lionize the soldiers in it. When it was an odious task to have to show a single GI get killed, and would be made up for by showing 50 Germans with machine guns get gunned down by one GI with a rifle and a few grenades (which in this movie, seem mysteriously to be nothing more than smoke grenades).
The only redeeming moments in this movie come from the odd moment when one of its stars gets enough screen time to say something memorable, or the odd cleverly scripted moment. Big, grandiose aerial shots of battle mean little when they're in no coherent context, and it doesn't help that they're interspersed with gratuitously slapstick humour. This movie is not even worth wasting a coupon on.